


The Diary

by QueenOfCarrotFlowers



Series: Carrot's Random Fics [3]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-08-23 18:37:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20247457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfCarrotFlowers/pseuds/QueenOfCarrotFlowers
Summary: Rey's brother died before she was born; Ben never had a sister at all. When they move into the same house at the same time they finally meet.





	The Diary

**Author's Note:**

> Based on [this prompt from @reylo-prompts](https://twitter.com/reylo_prompts/status/1161686849074683905): “Ben and Rey live in a cute house they got for a steal. They keep finding things being moved or new things they don’t remember buying. The catch: they both think they live alone. The house exists on the border of two separate realities and they're sure it's haunted.” This started as a Twitter fic but I'm moving it here to finish. 
> 
> This is a Gen Reylo sibling story, no incest. (I put it in the main tag simply so people could find it)

The diary was small, well-worn with a fine leather cover and sitting pretty as can be on the corner of Kylo's bedside table. He touched its corner with the tip of his finger; the soft leather gave pleasantly, bending around to touch the textblock before springing back when he lifted his digit. The diary was familiar to Kylo, and seeing it here made him slightly nauseated. It was his mother's diary, the one she'd kept when she was pregnant with him and right after he was born. It was, as far as he knew, packed in a box somewhere in his parents' attic, hundreds of miles from him. It had absolutely no business sitting here, on his table, in this house in the middle of nowhere.

He plucked it up and placed it on the very top shelf of the linen closet in the hallway, where he could just forget all about it. He didn't think too hard about how it might have gotten there to begin with.

* * *

The diary was missing.

Rey knew that she'd placed the diary right there, on her desk, along with a few other items from her parents' estate. Her mom's jewelry box was still there, and her dad's classic cars photograph collection. The things they'd love the most, and the things she'd remember them for. But the diary was her prized possession, the thing she'd wanted the most the moment she'd laid her eyes on it. she'd found it digging through boxes the weeks after the accident, up in the attic, in the dust and the old cobwebs. 

Rey'd had a brother. She knew this, she'd seen him in a few photographs, but he'd died before she was born and her parents had never, ever talked about him to her. She knew enough to know that there'd been some scandal around his death; her uncle had been involved, although she didn't know exactly how. So Rey had a brother she'd never met, because he was dead before she was born, and she had an uncle she'd never met, because he was somehow responsible and had run away after it happened, to be neither seen nor heard from again.

Her mother had been sad, always so sad, and Rey knew it was because of her brother, and her uncle, even though her mother had never, ever talked about either of them.

But the diary - through the diary Rey had finally heard her mother talk about her brother. Ben. Ben, with his soft dark hair and beautiful eyes and ears that stuck out just a bit too far from his head; these were the things their mother had written in the early pages of that fine leather diary.

The second half of the diary recounted their mother's pregnancy with Rey, and her babyhood. That section was much less interesting to Rey than the section about Ben.

And now the diary appeared to be missing.

Rey searched everywhere. The house was small so there weren't too many places she could have misplaced it. She searched the bedroom, dining room, the living room - including the corner cabinet, which she hadn't even looked at before and had to wretch open with a screwdriver. All the kitchen cabinets, and finally, the linen closet in the hallway. She was bemused to find it there, resting on the top shelf, under a pile of blankets she'd brought from her parents' house.

* * *

The diary reappeared the next evening, on the kitchen counter. Kylo was making himself a sandwich - sourdough, spicy mustard, smoked turkey, a slice of havarti - turned around, and there it was. He was certain it had not been there before. There was something else there too, something intangible. A feeling, like a sunbeam coming in through the window that he could feel but couldn't see. A warm spot; the opposite of a cold spot. Wasn't it ghosts who are supposed to cause cold spots in old houses?

"Hello?" He breathed in the warm air and smelled something familiar that he couldn't place. He set his palm on the diary - the shabby little book whose presence had no logic, and said it again. "Hello?"

* * *

Someone's hand was resting on the diary, but that didn't make any sense because there wasn't anyone in the kitchen except for Rey.

"Hello?" She whispered, and she felt a puff of warmth in the hair just above her temple. "Hello?" She whispered a second time, and then the puff again, accompanied by a distant echo of her own word. 

"Hello?"

"Hello?"

"Hello?"

Every time the word was spoken, the other voice sounded closer, until it was right in front of her, and the speaker, too. He was tall, with very dark, soft-looking hair that fell to his shoulders, and large brown eyes that looked so very sad. His eyes looked like she felt. Along with him came a scent, earthy and clean and familiar. It smelled like her father used to, when he would come in from working outside all day. The memory had tears pricking in the corners of her eyes, and she fought to keep them there.

* * *

The ghost was pretty, long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, tall for a woman but still several inches shorter than himself, with lines of worry around her eyes that he thought were too advanced for someone who was clearly so young. He could see not only her but the area around her - she was in the same kitchen he was in but she was also not, there was a calendar tacked to the wall behind her that was not on his wall, but he could see both the calendar and the wall very clearly and also not clearly at all.

"Why are you here?" Kylo asked her, and she looked at him, confused, with her beautiful hazel eyes, and she said in response, "why are _you_ here?"

"I'm in my kitchen," he said, and the corner of her mouth ticked up.

"I'm in _my_ kitchen."

He could feel his own mouth curving upwards, an unfamiliar sensation but a good one. "You're pretty sassy, for a ghost."

She laughed. "I'm not a ghost, _you're_ a ghost. Clearly." She looked down, then, at his hand on the diary. "Why are you touching my book?"

* * *

He frowned, first at her and then at the diary.

"That's my book. Well, not _mine_, it's my mother's. It's a diary she kept when I was born, when I was a baby." 

Rey's stomach flipped, her mouth dry.

"It's _my_ mother's diary, which she kept when _I_ was a baby. And my brother, too."

The man shifted, from one foot to the other, and worked his jaw in a way that made her think he was trying not to cry. He pressed his thumb under the soft, worn leather of the front cover and flipped it open to the first page.

_Ben Chewbacca Solo_. 

The words were written in a steady hand, black ink, across the top margin of the page. Underneath was scribbled _born 1__1/19/1983_ _our little angel__, our little bandit._ Under that was the first diary entry, dated _3/8/1983_ \- the day that Leia Organa had discovered she was pregnant, her excitement palpable in the entry, which Rey had memorized in the days following her mother's death.

"See?" Rey said, "not yours. That's my brother, when he was born." She was going to say something more but her words died on her lips when she looked up and saw the expression on his face. It was inscrutable.

"That's me," he said, pointing at the name. "That's my name. This is my mother's diary. How do you have it? How is it here?"


End file.
